Social networking has become an increasingly popular presence on the Internet. Social network services allow users to easily connect with friends, family members, and other users in order to share, among other things, comments regarding activities, interests, and other thoughts. As social networking has continued to grow, companies have recognized value in the technology. For instance, companies have found that social networking provides a great tool for managing their brand and driving consumers to their own web sites or to otherwise purchase their products or services. Companies can create their own social networking profiles for communicating with consumers via social networking posts.
To assist companies in their social networking efforts, some social analysis tools, such as the ADOBE SOCIAL tool, have been developed that provide mechanisms for companies to collect information regarding what consumers are saying and manage responses to consumers' social networking posts. Due to the often large amounts of social networking posts, it may be desirable for social analysis tools to determine sentiments of the posts to reduce the amount of manual processing performed by the companies. The sentiments may include, for instance, positive, negative, or neutral sentiments being expressed by of the users who submitted or posted the social networking posts. For example, a company may wish to address social networking posts that have negative sentiment or positive sentiment in order to strategically respond to those posts. Accurately determining the sentiments may be challenging in light of domain-specific expressions, colloquial expressions, neologisms, and other obscure content that may be found in social networking posts.